Is Atheism Implausible?

I. Silence and the Shape of a Question
Let’s begin with the silence.
Not the absence of sound, but the kind of silence you find at 3:17 a.m., when the world has
gone to sleep but the questions haven’t.
Where is everyone?
Why are we here?
Who am I talking to?
I will not pretend that I haven’t knelt before some invisible god when my best friend was
diagnosed with leukemia, or begged the stars to notice me, or whispered prayers like spells in
childhood bathrooms.
We are all gamblers, really—dropping our coins into the slot machine of the sky, hoping for
some kind of jackpot: meaning, mercy, magic.
But this is not an essay about hope. This is an essay about whether atheism is implausible.
And to ask that is to ask: Is it unreasonable to believe there is no god?
Let’s dismantle the question.
Let’s cut open its belly and name every organ.
II. Why Theism Seems Plausible: Longing, Legacy, and Logic
God has history on His side.
For millennia, theism has been the scaffolding of civilization—gods etched into laws,
morality, literature, architecture. Atheism, by contrast, can feel like demolition. A removal of
meaning. A cold subtraction.
The believer finds comfort in tradition. Pascal argues we should believe simply because of
what’s at stake: if God exists and we believe, infinite reward; if not, nothing is lost¹. Aquinas
lays out five ways to prove God’s existence, grounded in causality and motion². The universe
appears fine-tuned. Consciousness seems too strange to be mechanistic. Morality feels too
sacred to be biochemical.
We long for explanations that mirror our own design. The human brain, wired for patterns,
sees a hand behind every curtain. Lightning became Zeus. The flood became divine wrath.
Death became a doorway.
And then there are the stories. The personal ones. The miracles whispered across hospital
beds, the prayers that seemed answered just in time. These things do not fit neatly into
syllogisms, but they matter.
Some look up and feel watched. Some feel held. Some survive what should’ve killed them
and name the name of God in gratitude. And who am I to say they’re wrong?
To be human is to ache for narrative. A beginning, middle, end. An author.
And for many, God is the Author. The punctuation mark that makes life readable.
III. Why Those Arguments Fracture: Counterpoints and Cosmic Indifference
But the scaffolding shakes under scrutiny.
The Problem of Evil remains unyielding. If God is all-loving and all-powerful, then whence
suffering? Children bombed in warzones, disease eating innocence cell by cell. Leibniz called
this the best of all possible worlds. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov disagreed—and so do I. An
all-powerful being that permits this much agony? If He’s real, He’s either cruel or indifferent.
Free will is often invoked. But what of tsunamis? Childhood leukemia? The earth cracking
open and swallowing people whole—no human choice involved. What free will does a
six-year-old have in being born into famine?
Aquinas’ arguments assume the chain of causality must begin with God—but why stop there?
Why not a multiverse? Why not a brute fact? Bertrand Russell responded: “If everything
must have a cause, why not God? If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well
be the world³.
As for Pascal, belief is not a wager. It’s not fire insurance. You can’t fake faith like a forged
signature on the divine ledger. A god worth worshipping would see right through the bluff.
Subjective experience? Powerful, yes. But not infallible. The brain is a stage, and dreams
have been mistaken for prophecy since we first closed our eyes. Hallucinations, delusions,
euphoria—these are not revelations, they’re symptoms.
And then there’s the matter of holy texts. Sacred, yes, but also flawed. Genocides sanctioned.
Slavery justified. Women silenced. LGBTQ+ identities condemned. To call these infallible is
to ignore the screaming ink of history.
Science, too, has eroded theological necessity. Thunder is not divine anger. Disease is not a
curse. Mental illness is not possession. The divine is no longer needed to explain the rain.
We ask less of the gods now. Perhaps that’s why they answer less often.
IV. The Case for Atheism: Structure, Scale, and the Sublime
Atheism is not the absence of thought. It is its own cathedral—one built not of marble, but of
questions.
It starts with epistemic humility: belief should be proportionate to evidence. And when there
is no compelling evidence for a claim as vast and consequential as theism, non-belief is not
arrogance. It is discipline.
The burden of proof rests with the extraordinary. And God—omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent—is nothing if not extraordinary.
We’ve discarded thousands of gods already. Odin, Ra, Hera, gone to myth. The atheist simply
goes one god further.
But that is not all atheism is. It is not merely subtraction. It is creation. A worldview built
from the atoms upward. A moral system founded not on fear, but on empathy. A life lived not
for eternity, but for this singular, blazing moment.
We are not empty without God. We are responsible.
The observable universe is 93 billion light years wide. Somewhere, a black hole is
swallowing the ghost of a star. Somewhere else, a supernova is carving gold into the dark.
The atheist sees this not as proof of our cosmic irrelevance, but as context: we are small, yes,
but real. Conscious, self-aware, stubbornly kind despite it all.
We are the universe looking back at itself with wonder.
We don’t need a god to be good. We don’t need commandments to know cruelty from
compassion. Morality, as Sam Harris argues, can be grounded in human flourishing⁴. If belief
guaranteed virtue, history would look very different.
Crusades. Witch trials. Terrorism. All done in God’s name.
Meanwhile, the atheist can live a quiet life of decency and never once threaten hell.
There is awe without worship. There is reverence without ritual.
To gaze at the stars and not need them to love you back—that is its own kind of faith.
V. Conclusion: The Sky Is Quiet, and That Is Beautiful
If there is a god, and he is just, he will understand the atheist’s doubt.
He will know that disbelief wasn’t rebellion. It was method. It was integrity.
But if there is no god, then the atheist was brave.
They stared into the dark and didn’t make up a face to comfort themselves.
They built meaning out of atoms.
They forged light out of uncertainty.
They chose kindness without commandments.
They found joy anyway.
That’s not implausible. That’s heroic.
So no, atheism is not implausible.
It is the courage to say: I do not know, and still, I will live.
It is the fire that forges questions into truth.
It is not emptiness. It is a canvas.
It is not despair. It is a dare.
You want a god? Be one.
Be kind. Be curious. Be brave.
Create. Love. Question. Forgive.
The sky is quiet now.
Not because no one is listening—
But because it’s our turn to speak.
So speak.
And let the silence hear you.
Footnotes

1. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées (Wager argument)
2. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, Five Ways
3. Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
4. Harris, Sam. The Moral Landscape (2010)

my submission for john locke essay writing competition